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Tuesday, 29 June 2010

Vampires castles usually look rather large and almost ancient and that's the idea I suppose with drawing these types of castles, they must look this way, although you can experiment with the many different types of castle views I mainly use the tried and tested formula for drawing castles for vampires and here are the main things that I like to include in a vampires castle....

Bats, somewhere in the drawing I just have to draw some bats, it doesn't matter where they are, just to include them is the best thing about drawing a vampires castle, for the best effect it might be a good idea to draw a line of them appearing out of a castle tower.

Misty clouds, I usally sketch some in, right near the top of the castle towers, just to provide a little vampire spookyness to the mix.

A dead tree, drawing one of these to the side of the castle helps to balance the castle scene and also to add some other focal point of interest there.

A crumbling pathway, sketching in one of these, I just can't help myself as I always do it, one of these days I will try and draw the castle standing on it's own and see how it will look, until then try and set the path into the same rock mountain surface as the mountains that the castle is sitting on top of.

Either drawing the moon or a sun set if you are going to colour your drawing helps to set the scene.

That's basically the requirements, but do feel free to add what you want in your own castle drawing for vampires....

Right for my sketch, I wanted to obviously include my requirements above and so starting out I loosely sketch what I want to place on the page and go from there, see the drawing below to see how I managed that... it's a fairly basic sketch as you see, but it serves the brilliant purpose of placing everything that I want included in there.

The next part is trying to develop those areas you identified previously. now take this sketch and place it on a lightbox with a fresh piece of paper over it and what you are going to do now is to draw a more detailed version of your draft sketch, if you don't have a lightbox yet, try taping your paper to a window and let the daylight act as a lightbox (I used to do this until I thought, hey I'll get a lightbox!)

By using the initial draft sketch as a guide you can draw a more improved version of your vampires castle, and this usually takes 2 or 3 times to refine and get right, see below!

Now the next stage I decided to redo the lightbox method and absolutely refine the drawing and try and improve on the previous drawing one more time, to make a final drawing of our vampires castle with a bit more detail on the rocky crumbling mountain and the dead tree at the side, also I put in some bats coming from a hole in one of the towers, which was probably inspired by being forced to watch Scooby Doo when my kids watch it.

Now by no means is the vampire castle drawing complete at this stage, but the idea and the final drawing is there below, so take a look and enjoy!

Drawing the Grim Reaper takes a little understanding of drawing skulls and the skeletal form and ragged cloaks too, but other than that it's a fairly creative and inspiring thing to try and draw, I've drawn a few Grim Reapers as tattoos in the past and I loved drawing them.

A Grim Reaper of death is usually black and the skull and hands are a bone colour, although some artists contrast and black and white against the cloak and the bones of the reaper so this is the route I shall take with my Grim Reaper drawing, first as usual is the beginning steps, the draft drawing which will form the basis of our Grim Reaper sketch.

Sometimes when first sketching out a drawing of something you may think oh this isn't going to work, but if you stick with it, the drawing magically just seems to come together, well that's what happened with this Grim Reaper drawing.

And so on our first quick drawing of a grim reaper, we do the usual quick sketching to map out where everything goes and this just gets easier when we try and visualize the drawing and what we want to have appear on the paper.

The next step is to again develo this reaper sketch and start to tinker with it to see what and how it will change, it can be experimental at times and this drawing was for me and I just went along with the flow, I re-work the skull and start to identify the cloaky rags more, I used my lightbox to help out with this by re-drawing over the shape of my first draft sketch I was able to come up with a better drawing easier.

I don't add a great lot of detail at this stage, as I am more concerned about the form of the Grim Reaper, this will come in the next stage, lots of detail and maybe a bit more of the background.

Now I have re-drawn another version using my trusty lightbox and now I can say that I am having fun drawing in all of the detail, all that remains for me to do is to darken it slightly which I'll do soon, but this is how I draw a Grim Reaper and they are not that hard to do if you have the vision to carry it through and have fun while you are doing it.

Refining the image is what makes your drawings look better and this is what I've done, I've made sense of my first two draft drawings and worked through them to develop the idea further.

Monday, 28 June 2010

Drawing fantasy fairies can be easy if you follow these steps to drawing them. We all know Fairies are them small winged girls that fly about the place and sprinkle fairy dust around and in fact I never used to be a fan of drawing Fairies until I saw the work of Amy Brown and Sara Butcher, it was then that I thought, yes, I'll have a go at sketching them and trying to draw them, at first it was hard, but when you start to learn something new that you haven't drawn, then it will be difficult until you pick it up with practice.

When starting to draw a fairy, I like to get an idea of the figure first, because in my early attempts I did try to run before I could walk sort of thing with drawing fairies I would draw the wings first and then try and draw the fairy from the top to the bottom,an often it didn't work out very well, so I always with any drawing create a foundation of which to work from.

And this basic foundation drawing covers the rough figure of the fairy as pictured below.....and it doesn't have to be accurate or even perfect, as you can change things later, because I sure will!

And now we can refine that first fairy drawing by taking it and placing it on a light box or just place a piece of tracing paper over it, now as an artist you should be thinking in ways to improve the figure of the fairy, not re-trace the figure underneath, I use a pencil at first and then once I've got a good sketch going on I start to quick ink the figure, so I can scan it in my computer and clean up the drawing at a later stage.

Now the fairy figure looks a lot better, although the hands are wrong and this can be sorted out in the next stage of our drawing....as I just wanted to get the figure right and also notice how it is different from the original fairy sketch, I changed the legs and the way the fairy is flying and as an artist, this is what you do, you problem solve, you work out how to best draw something and that is all you can do, to refine the drawing.... take a look!....

Now the next part does involve a bit more work on the light box or transfering the idea and refining it further on tracing paper, but this is a solid method for showing you how fantasy artists refine ideas and make them look sparkling and magical and there maybe things that need to change still and that's ok, Rome wasn't built overnight in 30 seconds, so we try and make the figure better and also other details like the hands and the foot, because the other foot is behind the fairy, although I could have a few toes poking out, but it may look like a ding dong and this ain't no fairy in drag!

The third drawing seems much better as you go along and keep refining it, but there does come a time when you should stop and so I have stopped and just inked up a quick version of a fairy below....

Monsters are a favourite of most artists to draw and it's the imagination I suppose that really helps to create some cool looking monsters and so here I have drawn some rough looking monster designs and they have been inspired by other monster types, can you guess what they are?

The monster below is a typical example of a monster with one claw arm and the other a couple of monstrous tentacles and I wanted the design of the piece to be structured as a convincing monster. the sketch may need some work later down the line, but with this quick ink sketch, you get the idea.

When drawing a monster it is perfectly natural to try and make it scary looking, but how do you do this? Well you can look to really simple photos and pictures of insects or animals for inspiration, you can use what you want out of these reference pictures and I like to use a variation on different things, such as a dogs head shape makes a great werewolf, but then if you place that dogs head on a horrible mass of tenteacles and a slimy blog, you have created an original and unique monster, so just go for it!

Now I just mentioned the blob idea, now take that idea and run with it, the quick sketch below was just a quick idea and I didn't think much about it, I just started to draw big hands and then a blob monsters with a tooth loaded mouth and there we go, ideas can just come and you can draw some quite cool stuff if you put your mind to it.

Friday, 25 June 2010

This skull art keychain seems to be a popular item, even though I didn't add any colour on this skull drawing, it just seems to be good to buy, I'm thinking maybe there are some obscure keychain collectors out there that have snapped these up and so I hope to do more later on down the road.

Hey if there are any requests to do specific keychain designs then drop us a line in the comments below and I would be happy to create one for you.

Just created a skull art design for a new t-shirt on my Zazzle Gallery, and how I created it I simply drew the design in pencil and then inked it, this was a very quick skull design and then I scanned it into my computer and used the free art software Gimp to colour it and add some smudge to the colours, I used reds oranges and yellows and then an almost turquoise blue for the eyes and a glow around the skull and then used the blend tool to blend the colors together.

Then whilst on Zazzle I just added the phrase "Evil is my middle name" just for fun wih the font picker from within the Zazzle product tool dashboard, there are some cool fonts to use there and then wrote the description for the t-shirt and title and then added the tags and placed it in a category and published it to my store.

If you haven't signed up for a Zazzle account yet, then sign up here - Sign up for Zazzle it's free!
You can sell your own designs and build up a proper online business of new products, including T-shirts, mugs, Buttons and badges and lots of other cool stuff you can sell with your designs on, I'm making a good go of it this year with lots of new designs currently in production behind the scenes and of course I'll let you in on some of the how to's of using Zazzle too.

Thursday, 24 June 2010

Promoting your artwork online can be a task and a half, but it pays to know all the methods that you can utilize to promote and get the word out about your art, the online world is becoming vast and full of mini to large networks of artistic and creative types, so in the beginning, you will definitely want a blog or a website to showcase your creative skill in the form of an online portfolio.

Blog promotions

A blog is a very simple and popular way of organzing all of your art into an online portfolio and a blog is very search engine friendly too, meaning that your blog can be found for certain search terms that your blog could start to rank for, for example if your art is fantasy based, you could organize all of your posts within your categories on your blog into keyword titled blog posts, this makes each individual blog post searchable, but it does depend on you sticking with blogging quite regular.

Free blogs like Blogger and Wordpress are ideal to start out and then within the first month you get a good domain name that will point to your blog posts and a good domain name is one that is a keyword related search term ideally and you can also pick up some free blog templates to make your blog look attractive and professional, to start off with that's all you need, because you will be supplying the content and your artwork and also it's best if you write about personal insights into your artwork, like how you created it and what inspired you.

Blogs work on many levels and they help give an insight into the artist and your work and you can quickly build up a following quite quickly if you are commited to blogging and you can dominate a niche if you provide value and show that you are approachable and enthusiastic about your subject.

Website Promotion

Many artists opt for a static website in which you add the content on a number of static web pages, like a gallery page, a sketchbook page and about me page and a buy artwork page to name a few examples of pages. The content rarely changes except for updates that you may do to the site, but the smart artist will also have a blog that links to the static website, so that regularly updated blog posts feed updates to the site and also help rank your site in the search engines with every new blog posts that you create.

Search engines seem to like an updated website that updates often, as it feeds more content for it to index, so that the content itself can be found.

Along the way though websites need a little help and so do blogs actually, and there are ways to try and build more traffic to your artists website through social networks and building backlinks elsewhere.

Social network promotions

Sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to name a few are ideal examples of website promotional tools, because you can build up separate networks on each site to aid your websites traffic, but don't rely on it too much at first until you build up your networks there, think of social networks as little outposts that you can place backlinks to, whether they are dofollow or nofollow, it doesn't matter, because you choose who to be friends and followers with and usually you choose the ones that are interested in your subject or topic, so that they maybe more likely to look at and read your website or blog.

Article marketing is a great way that requires dedication to do as you have to write related articles on your topic that you know about that will relate to your website/blogs keywords so that they will be linked together and readers of the articles will be able to find your website, I've started article marketing about 3 years ago and it really does work, although it does require a focus and dedication to follow through with it.

If there are other blogs in your niche or interest area it is wise to network with them and comment on their blogs now and then in a genuine way of course, if someone posts an article that you like you could tweet it or share it anywhere you want or you could link a blog post or website link to one of your websites or within a blog post if it's relevant to the topic at hand, I've done this often, because I find other artists work interesting and so I show my appreciation of it by linking to it or sharing the links around the net.

Social bookmark promotions

There are sites out there that you can create short bookmarks that will help to build backlinks to your web content, again these may be a mix of dofollow and nofollow (by the way dofollow is when the search engines index your links and nofollow is when they don't!), but it is worth doing bit by bit to create a natural linking strategy, ie: a few backlinks a day will be enough.

Delicious, Shetoldme, Redgage, Google Reader are examples of bookmark sites, but be aware that some may have banned some sites from leaving bookmarks on them due to excessive spamming and backlinking of the site, so just check out a bookmark site and find out for yourself what's acceptable and what's not.

Forum promotions

A forum is a discussion area online that can be targeted towards a topic of interest or subject area and when established on the forum as a prolific contributor you can start to promote your website(s) in the form of a forum signature link that links to your website either with a direct http link or a keyword anchor text link usually done with BB code.

The benefits of participating in related forums are many and you can reach targeted people who might be interested in your blog or website, the key is to be genuine and helpful in the forums and answer questions as well as ask them, get to now other forum members and generally network with like minded individuals.

An about page

Most websites and blogs should have an about page, which explains why the website or blog exists and the reasons why people will find the site valuable it is very useful to use this page to link to all your other networks, so that people can connect with you at these other sites online, sites like Twitter and Facebook and any other sites that you create content, such as a YouTube channel or article directories if you write relevant articles that relate to your site.

An About page is a very important page, because it can usually describe what the site is about in the first paragraph alone, so make time to create one and direct people to it as well as the domain name of your site.

Allposters sell posters from movies such as Twilight and very popular cult films like Pulp Fiction, but also they sell fantasy art posters which are very good to buy, also though they have an affiliate program that you can sign up for below with the banner, so that you yourself could earn some extra money.

The posters are good quality and mainly because I own a few fantasy art posters from there I know that they are of excellent quality and would highly recommend them to anyone.

Sign up for the affiliate program below or go and buy a poster here - Buy A Poster

Also if you are looking for a place to store your drawings, photos or other design images, then why not try Shareapic and plus you can also earn from the image views that you generate per image, does require a large amount of traffic to earn, but hey there are some great artists out there and storing your images elsewhere for free is a good option.

Wednesday, 23 June 2010

The 4 elements, Earth, Fire, Wind and Water can be summed up with four separate drawings that are inspirational but also remind you of the 4 basic elements of life and that can be included in your drawings and as a bonus I will also include the other element - Ice.

Earth is an easy one to draw as it represents our planet and all the things that make it earth like, if that makes sense, you can just draw earth and lots of rocks combined together or just draw the earth, here I've opted for drawing a mound of earth with grass on it, simple, but effective for our inspirational elemental drawings.

Fire on the other hand can be perfectly random, yet also the most fun, because it is very simple to draw and can be drawn in many different ways and in the way I've drawn it, I wanted to convey a small fireball, but a fire ball that was more of a spread out fire object than a totally round fireball.

Wind can be a difficult one to try and draw, but if you think in terms of hurricanes and tornadoes, then it can be a good inspirational thing to try and draw, here I've gone for the hurricane and I wanted to include dust and debris in it to make it look a lot more like wind should be and this isn't just a small exercise in drawing a fart, it's much more than that.

Water is just as fluid as fire, so it can be that random quality too, in the drawing below I wanted to capture some of that, but also the random way water can fall too...

Ice is frozen water just in case you didn't know ....duh!, so it can form icicles like in the image below and classic ledges like a good old fashioned platform game like Mario

The elements can be drawn anyway you want and that's good news for the fantasy artist, as you can come up with something much better and also very creative, for instance you could come up with characters that would depict the elements like other artists have done in the past or even animals, the possibilities are endless, so have a go at drawing the elements in your art.

Tuesday, 22 June 2010

Drawing arm muscles is really just a good old fashioned study of anatomy and how to draw the muscles that all are stacked on top of each other, but if you practice, by looking and seeing how other artists draw arm muscles then you will pick it up, no matter how long it takes, just keep practicing and then later on try and think in terms of 3D, so that your muscles and dynamic figures that you draw look like they are coming out at you, look to the comic books for inspiration, one great one is Savage Dragon, that's a perfect example of dynamic figure drawing.

Below I have a few quick drawings of arm muscles and in the first one I just will go through, the basics of arm drawing, so in the bottom right hand corner you will see an arm that has been drawn in blocks, these are a rough diagram of the muscles and is a simplified version of how you could build up your arm muscles, Note - This is for a mans arm as you don't see too many women with huge biceps like that unless they have been taking steroids to pump some iron....

There are a couple of other arm muscles examples too on the page as you can see in different positions and this will help you to draw an arm with muscle.

In the second sketch there are two sets of three examples of muscles, we have the first one, which is very muscle heavy as you can see from the amount of muscle lines, the next is a slightly toned down version of the first and the third is with hardly no muscle definition at all, of course not every man you draw will have massive muscles, but it helps to define the form better, but that's up to you in your own drawings.

And the second set are the same as the top ones, except I have drawn the arms bending and flexing their muscles, which is always good to learn to draw as arms obviously can't be drawn just straight all the time.

Drawing arms does take practice, so study people and figures and learn to draw them in your own style like I have....

Today I thought I would do something classic that I'm sure all of us have done at some point at school or when we was younger or you have probably done it recently and that is to draw around your hand, in the drawing below I drew around my own hand and then started to shade in key areas on the hand and a part of the wrist and then I thought what if I darkened the finger nails and really made it a scabby zombies hand.

And that's what I did, maybe I could have added more skin hanging off or a few bones poking out, but I'll leave that to your drawing and imagination to do, would love to see what you come up with!!

I uploaded the original pencil image and then the added charcoal drawing of my zombie hand too, although you can hardly see the pencil drawing one...oh well!

My New Scanner just arrived and this will make it easier to scan images in for my daily sketching stuff which I wanted to do, but with a web cam the pictures looked slightly muddy, so now I can slowly go back and re scan them drawings in and start the daily sketch blog posts with a new found confidence, because the drawings will look great as the scanner is a HP Scanjet G2410 which is much better than my old one which is now ka-busted.

So expect to see new blog posts on the things that I have been sketching lately, to give you inspiration.

Monday, 21 June 2010

Art Book review, this time it is the book that I just finished reading last night and it is the 100 Ways To Draw Fantasy Figures By Francis Tsai, the book is a good read at first glance with good sketches and finished artwork to inspire, but look a little bit deeper into it and you soon find out that this book is not for beginners, of course there are some beginners aspects that get mentioned, but this book is for artists who already know how to draw, but it's more a book on how to take your figures of fantasy to the next level.

As usual with these types of books, the art inspires more than the words, but at least with a book like this it gives a guide as to how to draw fantasy figures and it gives a good insight into the work of a professional fantasy artist, so it's not all bad as you do learn a lot about establishing a character from the research of that characters right through to the design of it, but you do have to have an open mind when it comes to this character development process as you do have to have an imagination to fill in the blanks when you try and do it yourself.

The basics of figure drawing are also explored throughout this book as you attempt to decipher your own way of working on your fantasy figures. What I found useful was the little notes that the artist made around his drawings to also guide you ad also to guide the artist for later on and the very fact that you must have a few sketchbooks to hold ideas and concepts to draw on when you are finding it difficult to come up with new ideas - See here for 11 ways to create new ideas from sketching.

As in most other art drawing books, you are given a mix of the basics and more advanced ways to draw creative stuff, so take this book for what it is and learn from it, I'd recommend this book for artists who are confident in creating figures, but need a bit more help with relaying the ideas to the audience with visual communication.

All in all, it was a good book, but for intermediate artists to advanced artists.

Sketching new ideas can be a vast amount of effort, but a good one to contemplate, especially the end results that you really want to achieve in your minds eye. So thinking on them lines here are 21 quick ways to be creative for sketching new ideas.

Sketch your face in a mirror, once done, exaggerate the features and create a monster out of your face on a separate piece of paper.

Go on a wander and draw some trees, mountains or whatever you like, then use these drawings and sketches as inspiration to draw other things, maybe fantasy trees or a fantasy scene with trees and mountains.

Watch a good film, whatever inspires you and then have your trusty sketch pad to hand and draw whatever comes into your head whilst atching the movie or straight after, sometimes we need a bit of movie effects and story stimulation to boost our imaginations.

Take a sketch pad and just draw whatever comes to mind, free drawing is like free writing and can produce a load of crap, but it has been known to create some good ideas and gems that you could use for a drawing project later on down the line.

Draw what you are best at for a full hour, then suddeny change direction and try to draw what you have trouble drawing, this type of creative exercise works wonders with challenging your mind to come up with a realistically good drawing for the things you can't draw too well, try it!

Listening to music always frees up your artistic side, it helps you to relax, but also almost magically it can release some very creative ideas from your imagination, almost as if you are under a trance.

Quick sketch the things that you see in movement, try and capture the energy of the figure or whatever is moving, this is a good skill to master for an artist, as you can quick sketch almost anything and create spontaneous art that still looks just as good.

Always draw what you're best at, make a time that you set aside just to work on drawing the things that you are the best at drawing, trademarks are often created by the top things that artists create and plus, if you can draw something really good, then you can draw it from all angles and with infinite variations.

Sketch big and sketch small, have large sketch pads and also small sketch pads for sketch ideas, the way of working large and small is quite different and it mixes your mind up to work in all forms, larger scale sketching can be good for drawing battle scenes and smaller scale sketching could be used for quick sketching fast ideas.

Anything that you see, should be sketched, although ideally this would depend on if you take your sketch pad everywhere with you, so maybe take a camera and take the shots of things you find interesting as you can use these photos later for reference sketching.

Take the time with your good drawings, but never be afraid to abandon drawings that simply don't work, this frees up more time for you as you can just file it away as an unfinished piece of work, but you could pull the sketch out another day and find something in it to use a a basis of another drawing or piece of artwork.

Just sketch daily and organize all of your sketches into usable or not, but every drawing that you do, regardless of whether it is any good should be kept.....

Friday, 18 June 2010

Update: On 30th August 2010, I will have the free ebook which you can download on how to draw fantasy creatures, there'll be some good examples of the top fantasy creatures, like dragons, zombies, demons, orcs, vampires to name a few and this should be a good guide to use for inspiration as well, because nothing inspires more than having someone else draw some cool stuff.

If there are any things to add, feedback or questions about the free download, then do ask them below, because this blog is important to me, but also that you get some use out of the inspiration that this blog provides.

Thursday, 17 June 2010

Sketching vampire faces has been another sketch favourite and I do like to vary the faces to mix things up a little and with todays sketches I have drawn some classic vampire faces that range from a woman vampire to a man vampire and I even drew a vampire skull too just for added inspirations.

Vampires in most films, the makers of them films usually make the vampires a romantic figure of interest but I think that's just balls as you want the vampires to be vicious and nasty creatures of the night, not some love sick pasty faced teenager vampire, you want them to look the part or not at all. In the film 30 Days of Night, those are real vampires, no talk of meeting the family for some dinner or tea, it's off with the humans heads because we are hungry and who cares about the mess we make.

This one was fairly generic as a vampire drawing and as such I wanted it to reflect a typical vampire with the classic fangs at the top and bottom of the jaws.

Update - Here is the vampire drawing inked sketch....

The woman vampire I wanted to make it slightly demonic vampire with it's longer fangs with all the teeth and a much longer face which looks kind of cool, so take a look....

Update - Here is the inked vampire drawing, so you can see it slightly clearer....

And with the last quick sketch I just wanted to draw a vampire skull with the classic vampires fangs, so you can also see how that turned out below, these sketches took me 10 minutes for all 3 sketches, so get sketching and come up with some good sketch ideas.

Update - Here is the inked version of this vampire skull demon drawing....

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

Drawing a skull tattoo is something that I have done numerous times and it's a type of drawing or deisgn that I enjoy, much like the demon designs, every skull tattoo can be drawn differently and to a set design. I a recent drawing I decided to do a quick video series to illustrate how easy it is to draw a skull tattoo, although this was just the rough concept and the end result isn't the finished drawing as it will need to be cleared up if I ever made it into a proper tattoo design, but the idea is there for all to see.

The drawing videos are in 4 parts and so here's the first video, which is the first sketches of the skull tattoo, finding my way around the design and just searching with the pencil for some good strong lines that look good, the draft sketch is the important part as it is the foundation of your drawing, so work it all out on paper first.

The second video was spent developing the skull design further from that initial draft sketch and in the video I shave the top portion of the skulls head down, because it looked too long and I make other small design tweaks here and there, so that the skull tattoo looks a bit better and it starts to come together now, with some areas of shading and darker pencil lines added, as you can see in the following drawing video.....

The third drawing video is spent drawing some fire, blood and tribal spikes around the skulls head to add some extra elements to the design.

You could add what you want to at this point, just fire, or just blood, it's up to you, design choices exist for you to take them.

Watch the 3rd video....

The fourth drawing video is the quick inking stage, I could have spent twice the time inking this piece, but I dodn't have time to do that and you wouldn't either( but if it is something you would want to see, then please comment below!) the idea was to ink quick with my ink pen and not worry about being too precise, the result is some amount of energy that transfers itself to the skull tattoo concept, although I will clean this drawing up and colour it.

Here is the final drawing video.....

Keep the requests coming, because I'm getting some good ideas on what videos and tutorials to create now.

Monday, 14 June 2010

Drawing a hell demon was something that I got requested by someone over on my YouTube channel to draw and so I did a quick 2 part drawing video of me drawing a hell demon concept and in the video I draw it in a sketchy style, almost faster than lightning (ok not that fast!)

The first video is about exploring the beginnings of the Hell Demon and for a change I didn't do any talking, I thought that the drawing would speak for itself as I sketch out the figure of the Hell Demon before your very eyes. Sometimes the starting sketch needs to be worked on and this did along the way as I redrew over some lines and change them as the drawing progressed.

When trying to draw something that you have in your head and attempting to relay it on the paper takes some work as often it can go either way, well or not so well, in this case it went ok and it gave me something to work with, here is the first Hell Demon drawing video......

In the second drawing video that I filmed of me drawing a Hell Demon, I wanted to ink it in a rough and ready style that would look sketchy, but still clear enough to see what the drawing is of. I usually ink my drawings with a black gel ink pen or a fine line ink pen that is thin enough to get the fluid line weights right on your sketch drawing.

Working in a quick sketch style can help to give energy to your drawings sometimes, even if some of the lines look lazy and wrong, sketching in this way sometimes can make you free to the possibilities of your art and how you come up with art ideas in the future.

Here is the second video of drawing A Hell Demon......

I hope you got something out of this inspirational drawing video two parter and once again if there are any other things you would like me to draw and on video or as an article, then drop us a line in the comments box below.....

I found this interview from about nearly 4 years ago now, but it still is an inspiring interview nonetheless and so here is this interview with this master comic book artist. - Dan Panosian Comic Book Artist

Sunday, 13 June 2010

Steve Prescott is an artist that I have seen and mentioned before here on this very blog and I found a cool post about him and his latest fantasy art project - Aggregate - The Art Of Steve Prescott which is a book that looks at his art, sketches and stuff which show his brilliant artwork and the many inspirations that he has created.

Saturday, 5 June 2010

Sketching a dragon serpent like the one in the drawing video below is just a quick concept sketch, one that served it's purpose of a practice sketch, after trying to draw dragons and getting used to drawing them for a future drawing tutorial on my YouTube channel, I wanted to just get some video content out there about drawing a serpent.

Serpents are more like dragons without any arms, legs or wings and are probably classed as Serpent snakes but they do have a dragons head, so a dragon serpent will do.

Friday, 4 June 2010

When thinking of what to draw, drawing ideas can be of anything, things you like to draw, such as manga, fantasy art or monsters and other fantastic creatures like dragons and minotaurs, but also what you strive to draw better, such as faces and the perfect figures, there are already some excellent resources in the area of learning to draw faces and figures which I recommend you go to here.....Drawing Fantasy Art Ideas

Now here is a big list of ideas you could randomly draw or set out to draw...

Spaceships

Fantasy worlds

Aliens

Monsters

Robot/droids

Weapons

Castles

Winged creatures

Cave dwelling trolls

Dwarf warriors

Ancient wizard

Trees in a forest

Royal courtyard

Futuristic train

Golden eagle

Big fat ogre

Vampire bat

Skeleton warrior

Knights of the round table

Dark evil shadow

Did you know that by writing in lists like I've just done, you can quickly get ideas to draw stuff yourself, sometimes though a more descriptive name for something to draw can be useful for you to actually get on with sketching your idea out. So anyone can draw from the above ideas and I would like to see what drawings you come up with.

Drawing a fly was something so unexpected for me, as I am trying to challenge myself to draw new things that I wouldn't ordinarily draw and a fly was on my agenda to draw, because if you look at them really close, they are really great creatures and a good inspiration for drawing monsters, especially the head of a fly too, although this is just one fly drawing, I would like to do other fly art, maybe draw some other variations of fly from different angles.

The fly I drew in the video was a standard fly and one that you'd see usually on a hot summers day, big and black and when you draw a fly just try and capture the wings and the insect like legs and the black hairs that become visible when close up on a flies body.

Tuesday, 1 June 2010

How to draw and paint dragons is a fairly detailed book on the art of creating dragons and painting them too, I bought this book a couple of months ago now and have been meaning to review it as it is a good book in it's own way with the subject of dragons being explored over 5 main chapters, the first chapter deals with Dragon Anatomy, which is fairly useful in that you learn how to draw all the elements such as the eyes and the dragon head structure as well as the all important wings, neck and tail with arms and legs.

The most fascinating part of the head and face study is that some of the dragons that the artist shows as an example are fantastically realised and slightly different to the way you'd imagine them as, and as usual throughout the book the artists take their inspiration from lizards and other real life creatures.

The next chapter examines the different dragon types that there are and how you can meld them together to make some quite fantastic dragons such as dragon serpents and wyrm like dragons which not many artists do, but I'm getting into drawing more stuff like that and will do on this blog.

Also other dragons may not have wings and some may be more traditional than others, so it is wise to have a look at various dragon types to see how you can approach with your own.

Equally important is the chapter on bringing your dragons to life, this chapter goes through the importance of drawing movement in your dragon drawings and how to visualize the compositions of a fantastic dragon artwork, the most inspiring part of this book is seeing where your own imagination takes you to create some superbly realised fantasy dragon art.

Light colour and texture is the 4th chapter which takes a look at all these 3 important areas and also examines using digital colouring to get the best results from using light and shadow and textures, also with a quick introduction into the basic artists tools that you could use in creating your art, towards the end of the chapter there is a section on painting a dragon in oil paints which gives an amazingly detailed look at the steps involved in creating a successful oil painting.

The last chapter is a gallery which gives you some more inspirational dragon paintings to look at and take what you can learn from them and it basically shows you that most great dragon fantasy paintings do tell a story and have dramatic scenes within them.

Lastly you get some dragon templates that you can trace and scan into your computer to play around with and I found these useful to draw from and come up with some original dragon drawings for my own tattoo work and dragon fantasy art.

This is a good book, although there are loads of similar books available out there, this is one you should take a look at, just click on the photo above to find out more! or see how to draw dragons here